Once upon a time, a faculty member named Pat conducted
a survey and gathered considerable amounts of data. Being quite busy with
other projects, Pat duplicated the questionnaires and gave a complete
set of the raw data to each of three students who wanted extra credit
in Pat's statistics course. Pat's instruction to these students was short
and simple: "Analyze these data on your own without talking with
each other!" Well, as you might expect, the three students did not
analyze the data in the same way. One student computed correlations among
different questions. The second student compared men against women with
a t-test. And the third student created confidence intervals around mean
scores. After seeing what the students had done, Pat called the students
together. He indicated that each one had successfully and accurately analyzed
the data, and told each students that the desired extra credit had been
earned. Pat had one question for the students, however. "I'm quite
interested," said Pat, "in what accounts for the VARIANCE OF
ANALYSIS."

What do statisticians get when they drink too much? (Answer:
"Kurtosis of the liver.")

A husband and wife, both of whom were statisticians,
had the misfortune of dying within a day of one another. They had always
planned to be buried side by side. Unfortunately, the undertaker at the
funeral home got them mixed up with another husband and wife who had expressed
similar wishes.

This mistake became known as the first case of split-plot
confounding.

Not all statisticians are the same. When asked what they
want to drink, some of them choose t. Others prefer the hard stuff and
drone on and on about box-of-whiskey plots.

These 4 jokes were not newly written by me. Instead, they were
plucked from depositories of statistical humor, edited slightly,
and posted
here to in an effort to show that there's a lighter side to
this supposedly dry discipline. If you'd like to see more "funny
stuff" about
statistics, click here to
enter Gary Ramseyer's wonderful website entitled "First
Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes."